Conclusion

All three governance modes heuristically mapped in this book – Mapping, Sensing and Hacking – start on the basis that the world is not there for us; that the world is immune to modernist reason. Rather than starting from a subject-centred or hylomorphic imaginary of ‘solutionism’ – the biopolitical drive to govern life according to its laws – they start from the recalcitrant being of the world itself. In the ontopolitics of the Anthropocene the world is to be followed and affirmed rather than forced to reveal its ‘truths’ (which could then be understood and acted upon independently or bent to human needs and desires). The Anthropocene is even seen to lack the hope of a new science of complexity or of complex adaptive systems, through which order emerges from chaos without external or centralised direction. ¹ While humanity may still be physically on the planet, the ontopolitics of the Anthropocene suggest that we should govern through the imaginary that we do, in fact, live in a ‘world without us’: ² without a modernist view of the human as a knowing subject capable of transforming themselves and their conditions of existence.